I've worked in silicon valley for the past 11 years, in startups as well as two so-called FAANG companies. There are a lot of brilliant people out here.
So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas.
Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the world, even though we were all looked down on by many people on the coasts.
I knew a guy that worked at Walmart for years, right out of college. He said that the biggest issue he had with onboarding people was impressing upon them the scope of Walmart's enterprise. You don't just "move fast and break stuff". If your clever hack causes an outage in pharmacy, then you're directly affecting millions of people across the country that need medicine.
It's funny, because for the first 2/3 of my tenure there, WalMart Information Systems Division did move extremely fast....and yet almost never broke anything.
Story I heard from someone who was at Walmart recently was that the surest way to get in trouble was to finish in a week what they had planned to take three months.
It is hard to contemplate just how destructive the "cost center" / "profit center" distinction has turned out to be. For us, though, it means we had better stay the hell out of cost centers.
A business performing the duties of another's cost center, where costs may be amortized over multiple customers, can shift identically same tasks into a profit center.
Yeah...previous to moving to the west coast (working not for a FAANG, but a well recognized name that competes for much of the same talent, and offers comparable compensation), I was working in Atlanta.
I would argue the caliber of people I worked with there, from no name universities, or known names, but not equivalent to many people (Georgia Tech vs Berkeley, say), was generally better there. It of course varied person to person, but the teams were generally stronger, senior devs were more senior, juniors tended to be hungrier to learn, etc. Maybe it was just the lack of the FAANGs sucking up the best people.
Indeed, there was a comment here a few years ago from someone who was rejected for an interview, the stated reason being "Sorry, we're only accepting candidates from top tier schools. We've never heard of Georgia Tech."
I was like "WTF? They've probably never heard of Waterloo either!"
(For anyone unfamiliar, these may not be household names, but they are definitely top tier CS schools.)
I worked for a hedge fund that was like that. You only got in as a fresh grad if you were in a top tier school, or you had a strong referral from an existing employee. I got in on a referral, despite going to a highly ranked engineering school, but not MIT or CMU.
Edit: we also hired a few idiots out of MIT. Remember one instance when an intern from MIT sent an email to a wide audience something to the effect "your API is breaking my code, fix your API". This was in C++. They were asking for something that didnt exist and then blindly dereferenced the nonexistent first element causing a segfault. My response was to the effect of "youre dereferncing an empty vector. API is fine. Fix your fucking code."
The interns original email was sent to just my team, but CC'd nearly all of front office. In my reply I added all of backoffice so they were aware of the idiot. Never heard from them again...
I was in Minneapolis for Y2K... working release management/build engineering for a commercial ERP vendor, surrounded by Cray veterans (including my direct manager). The brainpower we put to Y2K was huge, but then again, we'd been selling product for a few years at that point as a "solution" to Y2K... just buy a new ERP system, and abandon your old in-house stuff rather than trying to fix it.
What a lot of Silicon Valley people don't get is that there are people just as smart as them everywhere.
While I don't have direct knowledge of Bentonville, the general impression that I have formed is that they are one or two cuts above any other enterprise of their size.
I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. Sharp people among other sharp people. It takes a lot to keep the lights on pretty much everywhere. Walk in to any big box store and look around for how many gadgets and systems there are.
Most everyone would be amazed at much networked equipment is in a WalMart supercenter. By the time I left, there were four routers, four big core switches, a couple dozen 'edge' switches, and scores of access points. And that's just the networking gear. As of 2009, my team's network discovery system had identified tens of millions of separate IP addressable nodes on the global network.
At that scale, everything had to be almost perfectly automated.
And, to be clear, this was not a static, boring network. Stores, home offices, distribution centers, you name it, were being added, moved, expanded, deallocated 24 hours a day, all over the world.
And the device configs were far from cookie cutter. An eye-wateringly complex heuristic was required to dynamically create router, switch and access point config that would allow a given store to function.
And, one quarter in the early 2000s, we (Network Engineering) achieved six sigma (99.9999%) global uptime.
Things did start going downhill around 2004 or so, a few years after Kevin Turner became CIO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory.
I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis.
We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down.
Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down.
(Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :)
So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working.
This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention.
There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL.
ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation.
Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest.
Home Depot. Even ~15 years ago, they had an amazing amount of technology to support a single store, let alone the supply chain.
I once worked in Point of Sale (POS) at Darden and several POS vendors and consulting companies. Even 25 years ago, your average fast food or mid-range (e.g. Red Lobster) restaurant had a network of ~10 or more computers running various POS, inventory, ordering, scheduling, and other processes.
So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas.
Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the world, even though we were all looked down on by many people on the coasts.